PicoBlog

This is the kind of thing that you’ll find if you browse the YouTube comments sections under videos of “You Were Cool,” the Mountain Goats’ most famous unreleased song:

One of my friends was trans and committed suicide back in 9th grade. I had met them online in 6th grade and we clicked instantly. I always thought she was the coolest most understanding person. They came out to me just a few months before they took their life. I can’t believe that was almost 8 years ago. I miss you Alexis

woke up at 4 am just to cry about this song its been an interesting day

This song actually breaks my heart. Don't really know why. It just makes me so sad, but I can’t stop listening to it, cause it’s so beautiful at the same time

When I hear this song I think of one of my best friends, she wasnt scared to be herself and not conform to the rest of the school, she got bullied a lot for this and was also homeless/not had the best home life...especially compared to some of the rich kids at our school.

I decided to listen to the song on the swings and i am glad i did. I started crying half way through. This is what i needed to hear even if it wasnt for me

god, carter, i hope you’re alive and well. i know i wasnt the best friend, and I’m sorry i never was, but you deserve better and i hope you got better. i love and miss you, carter, i wish i knew how to contact you.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Many, many people have been changed and sustained by “You Were Cool,” especially, in recent years, trans people and the people who know and love them. Many other people have just been incredibly moved by it, even the kinds of people who aren’t usually moved like that by songs. (“It’s the kind of song that tends to give me pause, and only after a minute or so has passed do I realize I’ve been staring off into space, looking at nothing.”) From a certain perspective, it’s hard to understand why: the lyrics of the song are almost brutally simple—“People were mean to you/But I always thought you were cool”—the vocal rhythm is haphazard, and the guitar part is something that a beginner could play. But when you listen to it with headphones at 4 a.m., or in a headphones-at-4-a.m. way, it’s much easier to get it. Something about the song sort of crosses the line between itself and you.

Something in his voice, mostly. The opening verse is a meta-sentence—“This is a song with the same four chords I use most of the time when I’ve got something on my mind and I don’t want to squander the moment trying to come up with a better way to say what I want to say”—quasi-sung over a D-A-Em-G progression. In the 2013 Carnegie Hall performance of the song, which is the one that most people listen to, his voice goes into a tremble-flutter on “four chords” and slowly drops a whole octave as the lines bleed into impromptu-sounding speech. He flies back up to sing the thing that’s on his mind—“People were mean to you/But I always thought you were cool”—but then the statement softens into an image and he descends a few steps: “Clicking down the concrete hallway/In your spiked heels, back in high school.” There’s a sadness in his voice, an opening-up of something beneath and beyond the declamatory mode, and it lingers in the air as he runs through the progression a couple of times in silence.

Another cascade of clauses—“It’s good to be young, but let’s not kid ourselves, it’s better to pass on through those years and come out the other side with our hearts still beating, having stared down demons and come back breathing”—another chorus, and then the chord pattern breaks; Darnielle stays on the last chord in the cycle, a G, and launches into a IV-V-I-IV bridge:

You deserved better than you got
Someone’s got to say it sometime ’cause it’s true
People should have told you you were awesome
Instead of taking advantage of you

They used you for their own purposes, whatever they were; they blotted you from their view. You: the strange, special part of ourselves that exists apart from uses and purposes, that burns a little brighter when it’s given air. “A thing there was that mattered,” Clarissa Dalloway thinks toward the end of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, “a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter.” “I hope you love your life now,” Darnielle sings in the final verse,

like I love mine
I hope the painful memories only flex their power over you a little of the time
We held on to hope of better days coming, and when we did we were right
I hope the people who did you wrong have trouble sleeping at night

On certain nights, it sounds like everyone at the show is shouting along to “I hope the people who did you wrong have trouble sleeping at night” and then cheering in a general sort of way, for the fact that the song exists and for the fact that they are all existing together at that moment by means of it.

And when they do they are right. The most important thing about the song and the best reason why it has never been released is that it makes that kind of live, collective experience possible. There’s a “we” that comes into existence in that moment when each of us sings for You. You can’t hold on to it, but you can remember what it felt like, and when the four chords start cycling again, you can feel it coming back. “If one and a thousand chances lets you read this, hi Tarin. Its Rachel, that little neighbor kid that always tagged along with you. I really thought you were cool. And I’m so sorry about what happened with your family.” “I’m glad I had a friend like you during the best and worst of times. I hope you’re in a better place man. R.I.P James.” “I remember you. I don’t know where you are right now. There is absolutely nothing I wouldn’t give to see you again.”

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